| ▲ | edent 5 hours ago |
| I despair at some of the comments on posts like this. "Mozilla needs to attract new users!!" Mozilla proceeds to add new features which new users might like "No! Not like that" Like, what do you actually want? A browser with a UI that hasn't changed since Stallman was in nappies? Things have to change in order to grow. Not everything is going to be right for you and that's OK. |
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| ▲ | embedding-shape 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Not everything is going to be right for you and that's OK. Yes, this is exactly right, some things won't be for everyone. The best part of Firefox (for me, besides being able to have vertical tree-style tabs) is that more times than not, you can disable and/or hide the change you don't like, as demonstrated by the blog post. Sure, I might not agree with every change they make to default choices but they at least let us power users configure the browser so it ends up just like how we want it to be, and for that I'm very grateful, as it tends to be uncommon in this day and age. |
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| ▲ | JohnFen 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don't understand what you're upset about here. Firefox added this feature and, like all features, it gets in the way for some people. This article is explaining how to disable it if you're one of those people. Nobody is saying the feature should be removed or scolding Mozilla for adding it, they're just explaining how to get rid of it if it annoys you. |
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| ▲ | edent 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | The post is fine. People can disable whatever they want - I certainly do. But (at the time of writing) half a dozen comments were complaining about "useless cruft" being added. Same as the AI integrations. There's obviously a market for them so FF has done some fairly sensible work to add them. And then people here explode like Mozilla has kicked their puppy. | | |
| ▲ | freehorse 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Welcome to the amazing firefox user community. Out of 10 commenters, you hear 15 different complaints, very often contradictory but always stated very strongly as the absolute way that firefox should be (even when it lets you configure it that way anyway). But in all seriousness, it seems to me that firefox has relatively more opinionated users, or users who are very specific/strict about their setup and what they want, and many are often fast and vocal in expressing opinions compared to the other browsers. I don't think we see posts around with people complaining about features in other major browsers in the same way (of course I could just miss them because I would pay less attention to other browsers). I am pretty sure somebody must have complained about the ff quantum update too, back in the days. | | |
| ▲ | embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > I am pretty sure somebody must have complained about the ff quantum update too, back in the days. You're right, a bunch of extensions weren't working initially, large parts of the community were upset about that. Eventually, as more extensions were supported and new alternatives emerged, it eventually died out and was almost completely forgotten about, until you reminded me of it just now. |
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| ▲ | oneeyedpigeon 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Isn't the point that browsers should, ideally, be for web-browsing and nothing more? Even embedding a PDF reader is controversial, but it seems entirely unnecessary that a browser should come with its own emoji-picker—what's wrong with the system's own? |
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| ▲ | edent 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm old enough to remember people grumbling when audio and video elements were added. Useless crap in a browser! Just compile your own MP3 player if you want to listen to music on a website! Same as WebUSB - heaven forbid that a website can become more useful by flashing firmware to a device!! The web is a platform. It will grow and mature into something we can't possibly imagine. It's OK for browsers to try new things to see what sticks. I assume that Mozilla have done some research showing people like typing emoji but don't know how to use their system emoji picker. Even in an ultra-purist world where a browser does nothing other than render HTML (death to JS!!!) surely people will want to type into boxen and POST text somewhere? | | |
| ▲ | pseudalopex 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > Same as WebUSB - heaven forbid that a website can become more useful by flashing firmware to a device!! Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html | |
| ▲ | roryirvine 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Even before that, there were folk moaning that "Mosaic has ruined the web with its pesky IMG tag - images should be opened in a user-specified viewer app rather than inline!". Similarly, there were people who complained about forms and buttons at roughly the same time and, a few years later, img maps, frames, layers (okay, with good reason), and CSS. They (or their spiritual heirs) always pop up on Firefox threads, for some reason. For those people, I want to point out that Lynx is right here and is as usable as it's ever been: https://github.com/ThomasDickey/lynx-snapshots | |
| ▲ | hulitu 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Same as WebUSB - heaven forbid that a website can become more useful by flashing firmware to a device!! Useful for whom ? The CIA ? | | |
| ▲ | edent 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I used it for both GrapheneOS (it flashed a new OS to my Android phone) and for updating the firmware for a niche LoRaWAN electronics board. The alternative would have been booting to Windows, downloading some dodgy .exe from an advert infested site, and running untrusted code which inexplicably required my admin password. I'm pleased the Web is able to put a stop to nonsense like that. | |
| ▲ | embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | People with devices to flash firmware to? Which basically is a lot of things, from musicians to physicians, and a lot in-between. |
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| ▲ | datadruid 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I've used Firefox since it's early days and I don't want UI changes. The move from XUL was bad, but I moved on. Since Photon, and even with Australis the UI changes have been undesirable to me. The only modern Firefox feature I like is the omnibar and the "bangs" - * for bookmarks, % for tabs, ^ - for history, @ for named search engines etc. But we have lost far more features then we have gotten. We don't even have configurable search engines from the settings anymore. Emojis always felt juvenile to me, call me a boomer (not really a boomer in age), but they are an eyesore for me. My ideal Firefox build would regain classic chrome from pre-Australis days with integrated omnibar. The UI would never change. Along this I would like some plugins that were only possible with XUL. But I know we will never get this unless someone actually makes these classic forks as secure and performant as modern Firefox. If it weren't for prefs and userChome.css I would have long since abandoned Firefox. Those are the only things that makes it still worth using. |
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| ▲ | zeech 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > We don't even have configurable search engines from the settings anymore It's annoying, but you can still toggle `browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh` to true and it will restore the add/edit/remove buttons for search engines. |
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| ▲ | hulitu 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Things have to change in order to grow. so does cancer. |
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| ▲ | aa_is_op 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| They can start by supporting more standards. It's getting harder and harder to view any modern site on this engine and the page load times are insane when compared to a Chromium stepchild like Vivaldi |
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| ▲ | embedding-shape 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > It's getting harder and harder to view any modern site on this engine Is it? What website can you not view in Firefox today? I almost exclusively use Firefox on my computer (Safari on mobile), and can't remember the last time I encountered a website that wasn't viewable in Firefox. Even my bank, which tends to be whiny about what browser you use, works 100% in Firefox too, even with all the warnings. | |
| ▲ | edent 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm sorry, but that's bollocks. I browse exclusively in FF and I can't remember a single page in the last couple of years that refuses to work on it (unless it's a weird web experiment). | |
| ▲ | quantummagic 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > ... harder to view any modern site ... Seriously? Have a few concrete examples to back that up? |
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